Cakes, baking and things I've been making…

Menu

Chocolate Nutella Cupcakes – A WI Special

Everyone loves a good cupcake, don’t they? Yup. What do people love more than cupcakes?

Chocolate cupcakes.

Add Nutella to that, and, well, that’s probably my dream cupcake.

I made these cupcakes for the WI.RED February meeting (I wrote about our meeting on Thursday). Every month we serve hot drinks and cakes at our meetings, and I’m not ashamed to admit that this is one of my favourite parts of the evening – I love to see what people have made! And of course, I love to taste them! Yum.

This month, it was my turn to contribute. I wanted to make something delicious (well, you can’t take just any old cake along to the WI can you?!). But, as I’m sure is the case for most of you, I also have a day job, and so didn’t have that much time between getting home from work and going back out again to the meeting.

I needed something quick and easy but scrummy. No-one wants their cakes to be left on the table at the end of the night do they?! I wanted to make something people just couldn’t say “no” to.

This recipe is a bit of a fail-safe of mine. The cupcake recipe is from The Hummingbird Bakery – you can visit their website here.

Literally EVERY recipe I’ve ever used from them has turned out amazingly well, and this one is no exception.

I made my own Nutella buttercream to go on top, and voila! Delicious, professional looking cupcakes (well I think so anyway!).

Put it this way, they all disappeared and there weren’t any complaints!

Ingredients

For the cupcakes

80g unsalted butter, softened

280g caster sugar

200g plain flour

40g cocoa powder

1 tbsp baking powder

240ml milk

2 large eggs

For the buttercream

200g unsalted butter, softened

300g icing sugar

3-4 heaped tbsp Nutella

A drop of milk

Method

— Preheat the oven to 180 degrees Celcius. Line a muffin tin with cupcake cases. This recipe should make around 16 cupcakes.

— Measure out the butter, sugar, flour, cocoa powder and baking powder into a bowl and mix until it’s combined. It will look quite dry, like breadcrumbs. I used my KitchenAid which made the whole process easy peasy.

— Pour the milk into a jug, add the eggs and whisk. Then add these to the dry ingredients, a little at a time, until everything is all mixed in nicely.

— Spoon the batter into the cupcake cases, filling them to about two thirds full. Bake for around 20 minutes, or until a skewer comes out clean. Leave to cool completely.

— To make the buttercream, beat the butter until its creamy, then add the icing sugar and Nutella and stir until combined. Again, I like to do this in the KitchenAid (make sure you cover the bowl with a towel or you’ll get icing sugar EVERYWHERE – I’ve learnt this from experience! Test the consistency – add a drop of milk if it’s a bit dry, or more icing sugar if it’s a bit wet. I like it very Nutella-y so I may have snuck in a few more spoonfuls… But have a taste. Add more if you like.

— Then, apply the buttercream to the cupcakes however you like! I used a piping nozzle, but you could just put it on with a knife and smooth it around.

There we have it! Apologies for the lack of photos but I was a bit pushed for time and forgot!